that, there’s going to be trouble. And you don’t want trouble with me, because the movie will only be the start of it.”
Bautista flushed. He tossed the nightstick on the cement driveway, and it rang hollowly there, and his hands balled into fists, and he wanted to blurt it out: YOU DUG THE BITCH UP YOU SICK MOTHERFUCKER!
No, that wasn’t the way. That wasn’t smart. Austin had already turned and started for his car, but Bat caught up to him, walked with him from the weed patch that passed for a lawn to the broken cement curb.
Find a way to get under his skin. Punch the robot’s buttons. That was the thing to do. “Your problem is that you just can’t handle it,” Bat said. “That I was better than you. That I did everything you wanted to do. Won all- city. Fucked April Destino. She was just a whore-”
“Don’t call her that.” Steve whirled, and Bat saw his own wild eyes reflected in Austin’s mirrored sunglasses, and seeing his eyes hanging there on Austin’s face frightened him more than he could have imagined.
Bat stumbled backward.
Austin grinned. “I just knocked you out of the box, and I didn’t even have to throw a pitch,” he said. “Maybe you did win some ball games. Maybe you did that. But you raped April Destino, and you stole her dreams.” He took off the glasses, and his eyes were cold green things in a face too white.
Austin chuckled at Bat’s baby-shit brown prison guard uniform. Glanced up at the crummy house where Bautista lived with his wife and kids, understanding that Bautista’s glory days were the only memories that kept him going. “Maybe you were a winner when we were kids,” Austin said. “But you never won when it counted. Now did you. Bat?”
Bat fought for control, but his fingers slipped over the scored grip of his pistol. The house behind him was honeycombed with dry rot. Even with his back turned, he could hear his kids yelling in the living room because the TV was on the blink again, and he could smell Hamburger Helper and pepper oil coming from the kitchen, and he could feel the uneven weeds beneath the worn soles of his boots, and his burning gut screamed for Maalox.
“You get the hell out of here,” Bat whispered.
Austin nodded, opened the door of his car, slipped on his sunglasses. “Don’t make me come back.”
7:15 A.M.
This is what did the trick for Steve Austin: fifteen minutes under a cold pulsing shower, a close shave with a new blade, a couple slaps of Old Spice aftershave, and a pot of a potent espresso-Kona blend brewed courtesy of Mr. Coffee. Then down to the neighborhood coffee shop for eggs over easy and four link sausages and extra hash browns well done skip the toast and four more cups of coffee that were pretty strong for restaurant brew but paled in comparison to Steve’s double-barreled espresso-Kona blend. The morning ritual took a couple of hours. When it was complete, the alcohol and the Halcion were behind him.
Or so he told himself. He had always treated his body like a twitchy machine that ran out of whack or not at all. It made things easier, just as it sometimes was easier to think of himself as The Six Million Dollar Man. He couldn’t fix the machine, but he could keep it running. For a time the machine ran on nothing more than dreams, April Destino, and Halcion. Last night, when it was ready to blow its main circuit, it ran on April alone.
Today it needed food and coffee. There was work to be done. The girl of his dreams was alive, living in this moment. Everything would be okay if he could just hold on to her.
Sunlight glinted off the spotless windshield of the Dodge Diplomat patrol car. Steve stared at his big hands on the hard black wheel, at the perfect creases in the sleeves of his uniform shirt and the swollen knuckles that had KO’d an umpire. The whole damn thing seemed so unreal. A living, walking dream was locked in his basement. A living, screaming dream. Every passing minute that separated him from April created another little hole in the window of reality. Yet Steve was sure that everything had happened just as he remembered it.
It hadn’t been a dream.
April was back.
He’d dug her up. Her empty shell, at least. That was nuts. Full tilt loony tunes. But he had been certain that he needed the dead husk of April to get to the real April, the April of his dreams. The dead April, the dreamweaver he had known in that sad little trailer, had convinced him that she was the only one who could help him to dream, to find the April he loved. But something had gone terribly wrong when the dreamweaver killed herself.
That was the way it shook out. It had to be. Because the dreamweaver was dead, and the girl of his dreams was here.
Real. Touchable. Beautiful.
No, that wasn’t the way she was.
Frightened. Tortured. Screaming.
That was the April who was locked in his basement. She had killed someone. Doug Douglas. Doug had gained at least a hundred pounds since high school, but Steve was sure it had been Doug. He couldn’t escape the memory of the dying man’s eyes. He’d stared into those eyes for three long years when Doug was his catcher on the baseball team. He knew those eyes.
He also knew that the dreamweaver had seen Doug on occasion. She saw lots of guys. He had never let that bother him, because there was no changing the woman that the April of his dreams had become. But he also knew that Doug had been involved in the nightmare that was born in Todd Gould’s basement. The dreamweaver had told him that.
But Steve didn’t know how, or why, Doug had ended up in his house last night. He stared at his creased sleeves, at his big hands on the steering wheel, and at his swollen knuckles. A fugitive from a dream was locked in his basement, along with her own corpse, and the corpse of a man she had murdered. That was the way it was.
Unless he hadn’t gone to the graveyard. Unless he hadn’t unearthed April Louise Destino’s corpse and brought her home, unless a screaming dream hadn’t been locked in his basement.
Unless he had dreamed the whole thing.
No. That was crazy. He didn’t dream, not at home. He only dreamed in April Destino’s trailer.
And April was dead. The dreamweaver was gone. Jesus. He felt like a cat chasing its tail.
“I’m awake,” he said, and he kept repeating those two words.
He drove around, just cruising, but he didn’t go to the one place that could set things straight in his mind until the call came over the radio and sent him there.
The pinched female voice of Control betrayed not the slightest bit of interest or surprise as she broadcast the call. The location wasn’t on Steve’s beat, but the officer who would have normally handled the call was busy breaking up a fight between a couple who had spent the evening gearing up for a drunken battle of epic proportions. Steve was working the adjoining beat, so the duty fell to him.
He had never handled a call like this one. Grave desecration wasn’t a top tenner on the criminal hit parade. Still, hearing the call on the radio put his mind at ease.
But hearing was one thing, and seeing was yet another. Seeing was believing, and Steve needed to believe. He didn’t hit the siren-no need for that-but he didn’t spare the horses, either. In less than three minutes he wheeled the gold-and-white Dodge Diplomat onto the grounds of Skyview Memorial Lawn, a cemetery that overlooked housing tracts to the east and north, another cemetery to the south, and a closed drive-in theater to the west.
Steve knew where to find the grave, and he drove to it.
Saw the lip of the open hole and the dirt piled high around it.
Knew for certain that he hadn’t dreamed the events of the previous night.
Knew that was true, unless he was dreaming still.
